By CARL HULSE; Edmund L. Andrews, David D. Kirkpatrick and David E. Sanger contributed reporting for this article.

Published: September 8, 2005

CORRECTION APPENDED

Republican Congressional leaders on Wednesday announced a joint House-Senate inquiry into failures surrounding the response to Hurricane Katrina as the Bush administration requested $51.8 billion in new relief money in the face of intensifying Democratic criticism of its handling of the disaster.

''Americans deserve answers,'' said Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, who announced the panel with the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, adding that a report from a select group of senior lawmakers would be due by Feb. 15. ''We must do all we can to learn from this tragedy, improve the system and protect all of our citizens,'' he said.

The decision by House and Senate Republican leaders to press forward with a rare bicameral investigation reflected an intense push to quell the furor surrounding the hurricane relief effort and respond to worries by members of their own party that majority Republicans were suffering politically.

Senior House Republican officials said that, behind the scenes, some lawmakers were pressing the Bush administration to dismiss Michael D. Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

''He's been compromised,'' said one top Republican lawmaker who works closely with the White House and did not want to be identified when discussing a delicate administration personnel issue.

Democrats continued to assail Mr. Brown's stewardship of the agency and expressed outrage over a private bipartisan briefing provided Tuesday night by cabinet officials. Several lawmakers said the officials, including Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, refused to acknowledge any shortcomings in the relief effort.

''You would have thought we had a picture-perfect response to Katrina,'' said Representative Robert Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.

House and Senate leaders said they expected Congress to quickly approve the administration's new request for aid on Thursday since the relief effort was devouring money more rapidly than anticipated. It would bring the total allocated so far to $62.3 billion, with most of the money directed to FEMA. Several lawmakers and others have said costs could be two or three times that figure over the course of reconstruction and resettlement of residents.

In a conference call with reporters, Joshua B. Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the administration expected the new money to ''last at least several weeks,'' though the White House anticipated it would need substantially more in the near future.

''I do not expect the burn rate to be as high as it was over the weekend, but it could easily be above the half-billion a day that we were experiencing in the first few days of the disaster,'' Mr. Bolten said.

Congress also got a report from the Congressional Budget Office on the national economic toll of the storm. The agency predicted the storm would cost 400,000 jobs over the next three months and could reduce the nation's economic growth rate by as much as one percentage point for the second half of this year.

But the budget office expects growth will pick up as reconstruction gets under way, and it predicts the overall economic impact from the hurricane will be ''significant but not overwhelming.'' It is also optimistic that the damage to oil refineries and oil production will be temporary and that fuel prices are likely to decline from their peaks, contributing to a rebound early next year.

The proposal for a joint Congressional inquiry was hastily worked out Wednesday after Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, said late Tuesday that the House would not proceed with announced hearings by the Government Reform Committee though the Senate did intend to embark on its own inquiry.

Mr. Frist and Mr. Hastert would not respond to questions about how the committee would work, but their spokesmen said it would have subpoena power and would be structured like standing committees that are controlled by the majority party. They said the panel was expected to be the primary investigative vehicle and would preclude federal officials involved in the relief effort from being summoned before numerous panels. They said it would begin its work soon, though they could provide no starting dates for hearings and few specifics on the membership.

Congressional Democrats, who were not involved in putting the joint inquiry together, quickly expressed skepticism about the panel's credibility.

''An investigation of the Republican administration by a Republican-controlled Congress is like having a pitcher call his own balls and strikes,'' said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, also expressed disappointment in the panel, saying that ''Republicans are afraid of a truly bipartisan investigation that can get to the bottom of why the federal government's initial response failed.'' But she conceded that it would be difficult to get the administration to agree to an outside investigation.

Bob Stevenson, a spokesman for Mr. Frist, said that Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, would be the top Senate Republican on the panel. But he said her own committee's hearing next week on the aftermath of the hurricane would still be held.

Republican officials said that they believed Democrats were risking a backlash for their unrelenting criticism of the relief effort, but acknowledged that their own lawmakers were angry over the response and saw Mr. Brown, the FEMA director, as a chief problem.

At the White House, Scott McClellan, its spokesman, was pressed about whether Mr. Bush still had confidence in the FEMA director. Mr. McClellan declined to answer that question, arguing that it was part of an effort by reporters to fix responsibility for the federal response on some member of the administration. ''This is where some people want to look at the blame-game issue, and finger-point,'' he said.

After repeated questions, Mr. McClellan concluded his daily briefing by saying that the president was appreciative of all of the efforts by employees of FEMA, Mr. Brown included, and that Mr. Bush stood by his praise of Mr. Brown last week.

As the House prepared to allocate the new money, Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said he would try to offer an amendment to sever FEMA from the Department of Homeland Security. Some critics of the storm response said the effectiveness of FEMA was diminished by its being placed under the broader umbrella.

As the House took up hurricane-related legislation, lawmakers on Wednesday approved a measure that would prevent college students from having to return federal financial aid if they were enrolled in schools now closed by Hurricane Katrina.

''All of these bills have one goal,'' Mr. Hastert said, ''to get help to the people of the Gulf Coast and to get it to them now.''

Chart: ''Rising Cost of the Disaster''
Congress is expected to approve additional spending for Hurricane Katrina recovery as soon as today. Here is a breakdown of the request:

APPROVED FRIDAY: $10.5 billion
NEW SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATION: $51.8 billion
TO DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY: $50 billion for FEMA recovery efforts, including shelter, food and medical care.
TO DEFENSE DEPARTMENT: $1.4 billion for military deployment.
TO ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS: $400 million for repairs to levees, pumps and channels.

(Source by Office of Management and Budget)

Correction: September 9, 2005, Friday
A headline with an article yesterday about action by Congress in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina referred incorrectly to an investigation into failures surrounding the government response. The investigation will be bicameral, but its political composition has not been determined and Democrats were not involved in putting the panel together. The article also gave an incorrect spelling in some copies for the surname of the director of the Office of Management and Budget, who said $51.8 billion requested for hurricane relief was expected to last ''at least several weeks.'' He is Joshua B. Bolten, not Bolton.